Thursday, 5 January 2017

Blog Tour Post & Giveaway: Lost Girls By Merrie Destefano

Welcome today's stop on the Lost Girls by Merrie Destefano Blog Tour hosted by Chapter by Chapter Today's stop is a review as well as a chance to enter the great giveaway that is being run throughout this tour.

Review:

What an awesome read to start the year of with!

I picked up Lost Girls because the description for this book sounded incredibly intriguing - A cross between Fight club and Black Swan? Missing time and memory? Main character trying to piece together the puzzle of what had happened in the last year and why she had forgotten it all? I couldn't wait to dive in! As I started reading, the first paragraph of the first chapter drew me right in and I didn't emerge until I had devoured the story a few hours later.

This story has such a great combination of suspense, romance and action. I immediately liked Rachel, she was strong and loyal and I loved the way Ms Destefano portrayed the complexity of Rachel's personality as she struggled to marry the life she remembered with the life she had now and find out the reasons behind it all. She was such a real compelling character and it made the story that much better to read as I genuinely cared about what the character was going through and the outcome of the story.

The story is also really well paced. As Rachel gradually gets memories back, we become privy to more and more of what happened before and the timing of this worked really well to propel the reader onward through the story. I think the further I go in to the story, the quicker my page turning because as I need to get to the conclusion and see how it all turned out.

I also loved the mystery of the story and the fact I was left guessing until the end. Whilst I put together a couple of elements along the way, I had to keep reading, wanted to keep reading, to find out where the elements I had guess fitted and for the solution to the mystery as a whole.

I also loved the characters around Rachel, in particular Dylan, Mollie, Rachel's Dad and brother. Again, the genuineness of their characters and their interactions with rachel really helped fill out the story and provide the feels that complimented the suspense and action actrion beautifully.

Overall, this was both an extremely thrilling and compelling read. I am so glad I picked up this story to read as my first read of 2017 and thoroughly recommend it. This was the first Merrie Destefano book I have picked up to read but it certainly won't be the last.

I give this book 4 1/2 stars!

Sapphired Dragon XX

Lost Girls by Merrie Destefano

Book Title: Lost Girls

Author: Merrie Destefano

Release Date: January 3, 2017

Publisher: Entangled Teen

Fight Club meets Black Swan—Rachel wakes up in a ditch to find she doesn’t remember the last year of her life, and that everything—including herself—is vastly different than she remembers. Yesterday, Rachel went to sleep listening to Taylor Swift, curled up in her grammy’s quilt, worrying about geometry. Today, she woke up in a ditch, bloodied, bruised, and missing a year of her life. She doesn’t recognize the person she’s become: she’s popular. She wears nothing but black. Black to cover the blood. And she can fight. Tell no one. She’s not the only girl to go missing within the last year…but she’s the only girl to come back. She desperately wants to unravel what happened to her, to try and recover the rest of the Lost Girls. But the more she discovers, the more her memories return. And as much as her new life scares her, it calls to her. Seductively. The good girl gone bad, sex, drugs, and raves, and something darker…something she still craves—the rush of the fight, the thrill of the win—something she can’t resist, that might still get her killed… The only rule is: There are no rules.

CURRENTLY A FULL-TIME NOVELIST and magazine editor, Merrie Destefano’s next novel, LOST GIRLS, releases on January 3, 2017. Her other novels include AFTERLIFE and FEAST, both published by HarperCollins, and FATHOM, which was self-published. The editor of Victorian Homes magazine, she has also been the editor of American Farmhouse Style, Vintage Gardens, and Zombies magazine, and was the founding editor of Cottages & Bungalows magazine.

With 20 years experience in publishing, she worked for a variety of publishing/broadcasting companies that include Focus on the Family, The Word For Today, and PJS Publications (now Primedia). Besides editing and writing, her background includes print buying, writing/producing radio promos, directing photo shoots, developing new products, writing jacket copy for books, creating sales media packets and organizing direct mail campaigns.

Born in the Midwest, she currently lives in Southern California with her husband, two German shepherds, a Siamese cat and the occasional wandering possum. Her favorite hobbies are reading speculative fiction and watching old Star Trek episodes, and her incurable addiction is writing. She loves to camp in the mountains, walk on the beach, watch old movies, listen to alternative music—although rarely all at the same time.